American Idol

With a divorce in the works and paparazzi in his rearview mirror, Brad Pitt should be in lockdown. Instead, he's having a candid conversation with Lucy Kaylin about how it feels to be the most hunted man in Hollywood.

Tucked behind the Chateau Marmont, past the pool, the palm fronds, and the rustling bamboo, sits bungalow 3, a slablike outbuilding for the privacy-minded guest. The entrance used to be a simple metal gate—at least it was back when John Belushi died inside, having succumbed to celebrity's more noxious vapors well over two decades ago. Now the gate is covered by a gawker-proof tarp with a ﬁst-size peephole cut into it.

Shortly after I ring the bell, a familiar blue eye ﬁlls the hole. "Hello!" the person on the other side calls out, unlocking the gate. In the tranquil twilight, there's a neighborliness to the greeting—which is a bit of a surprise, coming as it does from Hollywood's most hunted man.

Why Brad Pitt has no majordomo, no solicitous rep stationed at the gate screening guests, I'll never know. By rights he should be holed up somewhere in a dressing gown and Kabuki makeup, addled by scrutiny that just got worse: A few days ago, Jennifer Aniston, the TV-star wife with the bellwether hair, ﬁled for divorce, providing gobsmacking proof that their union was kaput. So while I stand in this peaceful spot with Pitt, I realize we're in the eye of a perfect storm, as the unholy trinity of a dying pope, a dead Terri Schiavo, and the Pitt-Aniston demise puts the tabs in an utter froth.

Tall and loose in a white sweatshirt and jeans, sporting his puppy-pelt buzz cut and an easy grin, Pitt leads me toward the door. He's got a cantilevered stride, recognizable from his shirtless roles, bringing to mind the cunning way his long, hard breastplate of a torso seems to attach to his hips like a snap-on piece. Amid the chirps and tweets and the late-day sun squeezing hard through the branches, we small-talk down the path—me telling him about a funny call I just got from my kid, which reminds him of a phone message he just got from his mom: "I'm disappointed in you, I'm angry with you, but whatever you do I'll always love you," Pitt quotes her as saying, which he clearly enjoyed. "All my bitches are mad at me right now," he says with a laugh, declining to elaborate.

We head into the spare, midcentury-style living room—spindly and clean, like something out of Bewitched—where a Duraﬂame log is burning in the brick ﬁreplace. Since the breakup of his marriage, Pitt's been hotel-hopping, trying to duck the special-ops surveillance. And given how much work he has ﬁnishing up Mr. and Mrs. Smith—this month's genre-bending picture about married assassins, costarring Angelina Jolie—the bungalow is more convenient than his vast new place near the beach, which he describes as "something I'm squatting in right now." As for the elaborately terraced, Wallace Neff–designed $13.5 million spread he lovingly refurbished and lived in with his wife—will they sell? "Well, we'll see, we'll see," Pitt says. "I don't know exactly, just yet."

There's a pile of cash on the table that Pitt pulls from when delivery guys show up, usually bearing booze and food, like the platter of cheeses and prissily cut fruit now sitting next to the money. Over by the couch, there's an open bag of jelly beans; on the ﬂoor by the door, a red motorcycle helmet. Bachelorville, in other words. Naturally, the wedding band is gone, but there is a large silver ring on his right middle ﬁnger with a curious space where a gem would normally be—"the anti-ring ring," as he'll later describe it. I ask Pitt who gave it to him. "This one?" Pause. "Actually, a friend."

He starts wrestling with a standing lamp, dragging it closer to the couches, trying to set the right mood. "I'm kind of a lighting junkie," he says. Chipping some ice from the freezer, he offers me a drink and mixes himself one—a vodka and orange juice, the ﬁrst of three.

It quickly grows dark beyond the sliding glass doors that lead to a yard shrouded in vegetation. Peaceful, maybe—although sitting here with the equivalent of a fugitive, it's easy to fantasize creeping life-forms close by. Pitt, inﬁnitely more experienced with this, feels it, too. "I wouldn't be surprised if they're walking this fence line right now," he says of the paparazzi, motioning at the void. "Outside our house, mine and Jen's, we had teams there every day. You'd have one team of three cars, a secondary team of three cars. And you'd drag 'em across town, but some days you just don't want to play." It feels chivalrous somehow, his uttering the name "Jen"—thus relieving me of having to be the ﬁrst. In his casual way, Pitt tries to undercut the mythic quality of his life and our equally outsize fascination with it.

"They're really nasty out here. I mean, some of the things they've said during my and Jen's split—things that are just deliberately said to get a rise out of her, just truly cruel—make me want to punch their lights out. And more toward Jen than me, which made me even more mad, because Jen's an easier target. Grown men saying awful, despicable things. Things that a normal father or husband or brother would go and kill them for."